Comment on Lemmy.zip Server Update - January 2025
Rose@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
One of the big platforms I managed had the issue of the founder not making a clear distinction between its moderators and administrators, which is one of the reasons I left it.
One is a public-facing role for people who are great at conflict resolution, while the other is for people who can program or manage behind the scenes. One individual exceeding at both skills is not common. More importantly, relying on someone for their admin skills means you’ll probably fear pushing them away even if they do a poor job as a moderator. This is what we saw with Rooki of Lemmy.world: despite the clear power abuse and the community recognizing that, it felt the other admins had no chance but to keep him because of his help with the platform development, so they even went as far as changing the rules.
Perhaps the issue is not as obvious now, but once the admin has been around and substantially helped you for a while, with a lot resting on their shoulders, it will be impossible for you to not think of that when deciding whether they are doing good as a moderator or if they should be let go.
Demigodrick@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
Thank you for the points and the insight - I do agree with what you’re saying, and I’ll bear that in mind. My absolute priority is to build an admin team that compliment the ethos of the site, and in that vein to continue on with how we currently run it.
Unfortunately Lemmy doesn’t allow us to split the SysAdmin from the site moderation stuff, which would be on my wishlist for the future of development, but our back-end stuff is certainly structured like that.
However, I do need to look to the future and make sure there is sufficient technical skill if I were to be hit by a bus tomorrow, and so it is something I need to weigh up.
One of things I’d like to do is build/train a level of redundancy into the admin team, so that if one person leaves or cannot continue for whatever reason, there is someone who can instead step in to fill the gap. Like you’ve highlighted, some teams can become too reliant on one person for their skills and I don’t want to end up in that position in the long term.
Unlike some other servers, we’re looking for people that support the current community culture and uphold the rules, and not instead change the rules to fit people 😊